Middlesex Hospital site sale to property developers, Aviva Investors and Exemplar Properties. - rekindles green garden campaign

Published: 06 August 2010
by TOM FOOT

A CAMPAIGN to transform the Middlesex Hospital wasteland into an English paradise of green garden allotments has roared back into action after the £750million site was sold to property developers.

Aviva Investors and Exemplar Properties has bought the three-acre site from its former owners, the collapsed Icelandic bank Kaupthing.

Activists secured a deal with the bank’s bosses to open 800 garden allotments on the land for at least one year.

But the deal collapsed and its new owners are preparing to restore the original plans to build luxury flats and offices instead.

Art gallery owner Rebecca Hossack, who led the original campaign, said: “We are going to start the plan again – we certainly don’t want a return to the Candy scheme.”

Brothers Nick and Christian Candy were forced to abandon their original “NoHo Square” development plans after Kaupthing suffered heavy financial losses during the 2008 crash.

The allotment project had unified the neighbourhoods of Fitzrovia and Bloomsbury behind a scheme that would have transformed the barren and featureless site into the envy of gardeners across the world.

But the allotment pact was cruelly scrapped by Kaupthing’s chairman in March, leading to a massive backlash from gardeners who had already bought soil and booked plots with organisers. 

Just as William Shakespeare famously wrote in Richard II, “this other Eden, demi-paradise, this blessed plot ... is now leas’d out”.

Exemplar owns a series of exclusive properties in and around the City and Aviva Investors – a trading arm of the banking giant Aviva – has a £249billion property portfolio worldwide.

Property experts said it was “a very favourable time for such development” and that figures showed the value of central London offices had remained strong despite the financial uncertainty in the world markets.